“Yes, I can,” said Vern.
“How?” asked Lucy.
“I could just leave,” she said, tasting a bit of the beans from the large wooden mixing spoon.
“You can’t just leave.”
“If you can, why can’t I?”
“Because nobody’s coming to get you,” said Lucy.
“I don’t need nobody to come get me. I can just walk right out to the gates and go.”
“Pshhh,” said Lucy, shaking her head. “You too much of a goddamn chicken for that. You can’t do anything without me.” Lucy lifted the glass top off the cake display tray. Looking Vern right in the eye, she dipped her finger into the glaze of the sock-it-to-me cake and licked it. To prove herself, Vern did the same, taking an even bigger chunk of the sticky white sweetness.
Lucy scooped off more, then Vern did, and back and forth until the cake was light brown and glazeless.
“Girls, what are you doing in there?” called Vern’s mam from the other room.
“Nothing!” they both cried in unison as they set the cake tray onto the table, grabbed forks, and ate the whole thing together in a race to the finish.
“You can come with me if you promise to make me this cake every day,” said Lucy.
“I’ll make you whatever you want whenever you want,” Vern said.
“I’ll make you stuff sometimes, too,” said Lucy. “Just don’t expect it to be tasting this good.”
Vern grinned and Lucy did, too, but when Lucy’s daddy came in, he went after his daughter hard, grabbing the same wooden spoon Vern had used to taste the red beans to thwack her several times on the bottom, pushing her out the kitchen toward the front door, all the while Lucy yelling, “It don’t even hurt, ugly,” to her father.
“See you later, Vern!” Lucy had called, giggling even as her father gave her a whooping. “Don’t forget that cake recipe.”
Vern never saw her again, her friend whisked away by her mother to a life outside the compound with earrings and movies.
Remembering that night now, she couldn’t help but think about that judge. Could he be the same man as the fiend?
“Feh! Feh! Feh!”
“Yes, fish,” said Vern, startling, only half an ear to her babe. She couldn’t see the wiggling creatures he pointed to below the ambling water, but she felt their slimy bodies slither against her calves. Feral was asleep on her back, oblivious, snoring like an old man.
Whenever Vern was on to something with the fiend, there were the children, reminding her that they could be her only focus. Neither could say the word Mam or Mama, but they spoke it with their every breath and need. They sweat Mam, blinked Mam, fussed Mam, hungered Mam, gurgled Mam, spit up Mam, shat Mam, pissed Mam, misbehaved Mam.
Their endless demands should’ve made Vern more sympathetic of her own mother, who bulldozed through life by feigning relentless positivity. It had been clear to Vern from a young age that the life her mam had was not the life she had hoped for growing up.
She never admitted this. She never admitted any untoward feeling. I guess it’s easy to be so positive with a constant blood alcohol level of point-one-five percent, Lucy had said once about Vern’s mother. Vern repeated the remark the next time Mam told her to cheer up, and for two weeks the woman uttered not a word to Vern.
It was the first time Vern understood conclusively that facades could be cracked. When Mam became her mind-numbing cheery self again, Vern didn’t mind. Lies could be revealed. What beautiful knowledge.
Whatever Vern managed in the mothering department, it surpassed her mam’s approach: alcohol and platitudes. To the woman’s credit, Vern was, in fact, keeping calm and carrying on. Letting go and letting God. Learning that where there was a will, there was, indeed, a way.
Vern lived. She made gear. Hats to fit her babies’ fat yam heads, a linen gown, two wool pullovers and two pairs of knee socks, leggings made of rabbit furs for winter. She did what she could to not die.
In these days, days of endless summer, infinitely lonely days, Vern rarely thought of much but her own vigorous breath. Cainland and the fiend should’ve been her priority, but with her babes to look after, those questions became accessories. She did no more than what needed doing, a burrowing orphan, digging, digging forward, making her world.
4
ONE BRIGHT SEPTEMBER EVENING hot as freshly whipped flesh, Vern tied cloth to Howling and Feral’s waists, the other end to a tree. She let them wander in the shallow water near the bank while she fished. As she was hauling her winnings back toward them, she saw Howling, all dark and darker so from sun, rolling away into the water. Her little one, her firstborn, had been taken by the rushing river.